While the 18th century in the Balkans was dominated by the steady decline of Ottoman power, the outstanding feature of the 19th century was the creation of alleged nation-states on what had been Ottoman territory. Because the emergence of national consciousness and the creation of nation-states were conditioned by local factors, each nation evolved in an individual way. Nevertheless, some general characteristics are discernible.

The first is that external factors were the ultimate determinants. No Balkan people, no matter how strong their sense of national purpose, could achieve independent statehood, or even a separate administrative identity, without external support. Foreign military intervention on behalf of particular groups was common; Russia aided the Serbs and Bulgarians, while Britain, France, and Russia intervened for the Greeks. The Romanians benefited from the wars of Italian and German unification, and Albanian independence would have been impossible had the Balkan states not smashed Ottoman power in Europe in the First Balkan War (1912–13).

External intervention came about after indigenous nationalist movements had evolved and eventually fomented unrest or even rebellion. These movements were financed to a large extent by internal wealth, but—with the exception of the peripheral areas of the Greek, Romanian, and Dalmatian lands—such wealth could not be generated until the region had returned to a level of stability that allowed agriculture, trade, and manufacturing to flourish. This situation was not achieved until the 1830s, after the empire had been rocked by the Napoleonic and Russian invasions, the Romanian revolt of 1821, the War of Greek Independence (1821–32), and the suppression of the Janissaries in 1826. Even the Serbs under Karadjordje (“Black George”) and Miloš Obrenović had only a limited form of autonomy until the 1830s. With the return of relative calm, trade in cloth, animals, copperware, and other goods increased rapidly. Guilds accumulated excess funds and used them to enhance local villages or towns, many of which saw new churches, clock towers, or covered markets in the 1830s and thereafter. The guilds and individual merchants also endowed schools or financed individual scholars to study in Russia, central Europe, or the great educational establishments that appeared in Constantinople. Sometimes wealth was generated by national communities outside what became the national territory of a particular people; for example, the pig merchants of Serbia were not as wealthy as the richest of their Serb trading partners in the Habsburg lands, while the most successful Bulgarian merchants of Constantinople or the Romanian principalities lived in greater opulence than did those in the cloth towns along the foothills of the Balkan Mountains.

Creating a national identity

In the Balkans the formation of the state was subsequent to and consequent upon the emergence of a national movement. In the early years of the 19th century, even among the semiliberated Serbs and Romanians, there was little sense of national identity outside a very small circle of the native intelligentsia. The creation and dissemination of a sense of national identity was usually the work of national apostles who pointed back to more glorious years. In Bulgaria, for example, the monk Paisiy of Khilendar chronicled the glories of the medieval tsars and saints. In the same way, Serbs were reminded of the achievements of Stefan Dušan, and Albanians looked back to the exploits of Skanderbeg. But the echoes of history would not have resonated had a sense of national identity, however weak and apolitical, not somehow been preserved during the long centuries of Ottoman domination.

One medium for the preservation of national identity had been folklore and folksong. It was these, and especially the epic narrative poetry of Serbia, that had kept alive the memory of Dušan, Skanderbeg, and others. Some told of the exploits of the armed bandits who appeared in most Balkan lands—the klephts, haiduks, and armataloi; these were usually no more than brigands, but, because they discomforted the authorities, they, like Robin Hood in England, were given the characteristics of folk heroes. A sense of national identity also owed its survival to the fact that Ottoman power was concentrated in the towns. The villages were still largely Christian, and here Christian customs survived largely unaffected by the new dominant religion. Also, the Ottomans frequently left the administration of villages in the hands of villagers; this was especially the case in communities entrusted with special functions, such as guarding a pass, supplying water to an imperial palace, or even providing birds for the sultan’s falconry. In these self-governing villages, the habits of and the taste for self-administration were acquired, and here too a native leadership cadre was born.

Religion played an integral part in preserving national identity. Even in the first, violent years of their conquest, the Ottomans seldom touched monasteries, where relics, icons, books, and other cultural treasures were zealously guarded. In the churches the survival of ancient liturgies provided continuity with the non-Muslim past, while even the millet system performed the invaluable function of preserving administration in the native language. Serbian, and even more so Bulgarian, national awareness first became noticeable among the mass of the peasant population in the 18th century when the Greek patriarchate forced Greek bishops and even priests on Serbian and Bulgarian communities.

Religion could differentiate a Roman Catholic from an Orthodox just as effectively as an Orthodox from a Muslim. In Transylvania before 1848, for example, there was growing dissatisfaction among Orthodox Romanians, who were excluded by the Austrian rulers from the three recognized nations—Saxons, Szeklers, and Magyars (Hungarians)—and from the four officially sanctioned religions—Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, and Uniate.

The banner of the first small groups of national apostles was taken up by new disciples, and they in turn spread the ideas of national identity, particularly through education and the literacy that it bred. Education took place not only in schools but also, in many areas (particularly Serbia and Bulgaria), in “reading-rooms”—though this English translation does not convey the full meaning of the chitalishte, an institution that not only provided books and newspapers but also organized education for adults and staged plays, debates, and discussions. Nor was it by any means always the case that the new schools were culturally exclusive; in Bulgaria, at least in the early years of the national revival, many subjects were still taught in Greek. Thus, national reawakening was hindered in its early years by the lack of unified national alphabets or literary languages. Indeed, the Albanians had neither until the first decade of the 20th century.

Forging the state

Once the national movements had reached fruition and foreign intervention had taken place, external forces again played a major part in determining the nature of the states that were to be created—though this was less the case with Montenegro and Serbia, which emerged earlier and more gradually than the other states. In all cases the new states were required by the European powers to be monarchies, and—again with the exception of Serbia and Montenegro—they were also required to accept nonnative dynasties. All states except Serbia and Montenegro underwent a change of dynasty, and almost all ended with a minor German princeling on the throne. (Albania was the exception, because it began with a German and ended with a native prince.) The Great Powers also played an important part in determining legal and constitutional structures, usually with the intention of protecting minority rights, as with the Muslims of Bulgaria and the Jews of Romania.

Once established, the new Balkan states, both before and after World War I, attempted to build political and economic structures based upon those that had evolved in the West. However, their endeavour was hampered by their own histories, which had produced societies and psyches much different from those to the west. Population shifts—which inside western Europe had ceased in the 10th century—continued in the Balkans into the 20th century. The Roman and Byzantine empires had suffered constant incursion, and Saxons, Szeklers, and Swabians had been brought into Transylvania to help repair the depredations of the Mongols and other invaders. After the Ottoman conquest Muslims had moved into Albania, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Macedonia—some of them migrants from Anatolia, others former prisoners of war or freed slaves, and still others simply converts. When the Russian armies withdrew north of the Danube after the Russo-Turkish War of 1828–29, thousands of Bulgarians left with them, settling eventually in southern Bessarabia; and after the Crimean War the sultan’s government settled 100,000 to 250,000 Muslim Circassians, who otherwise would have been included in Russia, as a defensive force on the northern fringes of the Ottomans’ Balkan possessions.

Further ethnic relocations and atrocities perpetrated by both Ottoman forces and Christian rebels occurred during the process of liberation, and, after the creation of the nation-states, Muslims left in large numbers. Some of these were driven out by force during or immediately after liberation, but many more left voluntarily in subsequent decades. Many Muslims could not adapt to a system in which they were no longer the privileged element. Now that Islamic law did not have automatic supremacy over other legal codes, Christian women could walk freely unveiled in the streets, and mosques could be secularized and turned to profane usage. Even worse, in most new nation-states Muslims were conscripted into the new armies, in which, even if they did not have to wear the cross on their uniforms, they could not escape having to endure Christian holidays and rituals. Those who left were both peasant and landlord. In Moldavia and Walachia, Muslims were forbidden to own landed property, and in other countries they were subject to a land tax. Previously, Muslims had paid taxes on what they produced rather than what they owned, and, because they customarily left up to a third or half of their land fallow, the shift to a tax based on possession rather than production was a considerable burden. As large numbers of Muslims emigrated, fewer remained to pay for and manage schools and other Muslim institutions—even though some of the latter were maintained by vakifs, estates left in perpetuity for this purpose.

There were ethnic shifts for all major religious groups. After the creation of the Bulgarian state in 1878, not only did Muslims leave, but Christian refugees arrived from Macedonia and Thrace. Jews suffering discrimination in Russia moved into Bessarabia, Moldavia, and Walachia throughout the 19th century, and Armenians fleeing the appalling massacres of the 1890s found safety in Bulgaria. After the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908, many Muslims moved into Macedonia and Thrace. After the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, the flood of refugees between Greece and Anatolia led to the first of a series of population-exchange agreements, and there were similar agreements between Bulgaria and Greece after World War I.

At times the creation of independent states exacerbated ethnic problems. The complexities of the ethnic map made it impossible to draw state boundaries that entirely coincided with ethnic divisions and thus created minority problems that were to plague the region for generations. There was a further complication in that the new boundaries frequently interrupted established patterns of economic, social, and cultural activity. For many generations Vlach shepherds had driven their flocks from region to region in the centre of the peninsula, just as Bulgarians had traditionally driven their sheep to market in Edirne or Constantinople. These established activities became more difficult when new state boundaries were established. Traditional fairs, for generations the established medium for the exchange of many products, were also disrupted. In some instances—for example, when the Albanian state was created in 1913—new borders separated villages from their summer pastures or, even more seriously, cut them off from a favourite shrine, church, or monastery. Similarly, new frontiers often separated monasteries from distant properties on whose income they relied. These problems arose from the creation of supposedly modern states in areas where social and economic conditions were far from modern.

The task of creating Western-style modern states was made more difficult by the lack of capital. With the exception of Romania, where commercialized, export-oriented agriculture was widely developed, most of formerly Ottoman Europe was dominated by small, self-sufficient peasant proprietors. They generated little surplus capital, and, until the end of the 19th century, those peasants or merchants who did have surplus funds found that moneylending provided much higher rates of return than did any form of productive investment. Meanwhile, financial sophistication was so limited that double-column bookkeeping was hardly known. Thus, these states were dependent on the external, developed world for capital and commercial expertise, as well as for arms and for manufactured goods, though such dependence did not necessarily lead to political subservience.

In the late 19th century, Balkan peasants suffered from a fall in world food prices. The situation was made worse in that, because income from the sale of agricultural produce was declining, governments were less willing to rely upon the tithe as a major form of taxation. Coming at a time when peasant cash incomes were falling and indebtedness was widespread, the decision to require that taxes be paid in cash produced considerable tension. This tension in turn led to outbursts of unrest, to the formation of cooperatives, and, subsequently, to the development of the agrarian political parties that were to play a significant role in most Balkan states after World War I.

In their political evolution the Balkan states saw strong pressures toward centralization and toward the strengthening of executive as opposed to legislative powers. These trends frequently clashed with the populace’s political instincts, particularly in Serbia and Bulgaria, where local power, frequently vested in the village and its elders, had served as a cushion against Ottoman pressure and had been one of the means by which national identity had been preserved. Consequently, much of the constitutional instability that afflicted 19th-century Serbia derived from clashes between the new royal authorities in Belgrade and local village chieftains. Likewise, Alexander of Battenberg, the first prince of Bulgaria, attempted to reconstruct Sofia’s municipal council in 1879 and was told that not even the Turks would have dared to do that.

Political participation in all Balkan states soon became restricted to a small segment of the population. The large landowners had a great influence on the politics of Romania before World War I and on Albania after it, but in all countries the intelligentsia was also actively engaged. A distinction emerged, however, between that part of the intelligentsia that remained politically independent and the part that became linked to the ruling apparatus through the system of clientism and jobbery (public corruption) that soon affected the entire peninsula. This development had deleterious effects on the Balkan states. It lured a substantial part of the intelligentsia into state office in return for political obedience and thereby corrupted some of the ablest citizens by leading them to close their eyes to abuses of power. Corruption in turn produced a widening rift between the peasants and those who wielded power; throughout the Balkans it was commonly observed that the worst oppressor was the peasant who had only just entered the ranks of the influential.

Influence and wealth could be acquired in the bureaucracy, which before 1914 expanded steadily in all states except Montenegro and Albania, but the same goals could also be pursued in the army. The military became a significant factor in Bulgaria after the deposition of Prince Alexander in 1886 and in Serbia after the overthrow of the Obrenović dynasty in 1903. In Romania the military played a less-prominent role in political power brokering, but it was an avenue for social advancement. After World War I and even during the years of communist domination after World War II, the army remained a powerful factor in the political affairs of all states.

The Balkan states emerged separately and at different times. Although their freedom of action was limited by the Great Powers, they all had claims to further territory that they considered theirs by ethnic or historic right, and notions of Balkan union or solidarity were therefore rare and transitory. The Serbs toyed with such ideas in the 1860s, and the Balkan states did manage to cohere long enough in 1912–13 to destroy what was left of Ottoman power in the peninsula. But fleeting cooperation soon gave way in 1913 to recrimination and bloody conflict. Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece were unable to agree upon a division of Macedonia, and they clashed again over the same issue in 1914.

The world war period

World War I

No Balkan state wished to become embroiled in World War I, even though it was precipitated by the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne by a Bosnian Serb nationalist who worked in collusion with elements in the Serbian secret police. To Austria’s ultimatum of July 1914, Serbia sent an abject reply, accepting most of the demands and offering to submit the most unreasonable ones to international arbitration. Once conflict had been forced upon the peninsula, Montenegro declared war with reluctance in early August, Bulgaria stood aside until committing itself to the Central Powers in September 1915, Romania was not persuaded to join the Allied Powers until 1916, and Albania was powerless to avoid partitioning by the warring parties. Moreover, the Balkans were not a major theatre of operations. The Central Powers finally subdued Serbia after their second onslaught, launched in 1915. In that same year the Allies sent their ill-fated expedition to Gallipoli in the Dardanelles, and in the autumn of 1916 they established themselves in Salonika. However, their armies did not move from the latter location until toward the end of the war, when they marched up the Danube to become the main instrument of Allied authority in south-central Europe in the immediate postwar years.

Nevertheless, although they may have had no desire for the conflict, the Balkan states and peoples could not escape its consequences. All suffered serious economic dislocation, and the mass mobilization resulted in severe casualties, particularly in Serbia. In less-developed societies the impact of total mobilization was felt in other ways. The requisitioning of draft animals, for example, caused severe problems in villages that were already suffering from the enlistment of young men, and many recently created trade connections were ruined.

Greater Romania and Yugoslavia

In the 19th century, state formation in the Balkans occurred when the region’s Christian population induced foreign intervention to secure its separation from Ottoman power. This process had not been allowed to penetrate into the Habsburg and Russian empires, however, and these retained their own territories and interests in the Balkans—Russian aspirations concentrating on Constantinople and the Dardanelles and Austria-Hungary’s thought to be in securing Salonika. World War I destroyed those two empires. The future of their Balkan possessions—Croatia-Slavonia, Dalmatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Vojvodina, Slovenia, Bukovina, the Banat of Temesvár, Transylvania, and Bessarabia—had to be decided by delegates at the Paris Peace Conference (1919–20), not in gradual and piecemeal fashion but altogether and immediately. Because the population of Transylvania, the Banat, Bessarabia, and Bukovina was predominantly Romanian, the bulk of these areas were included in the Romanian kingdom. Most of the remaining areas were predominantly Serbo-Croatian speaking and became constituent parts of the new triune Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.

Inevitably the settlements could not completely follow ethnic lines of division. The Banat and the Vojvodina were very mixed in ethnic composition; Transylvania had substantial Hungarian and German minorities; Bessarabia and Bukovina had many Jewish and Ukrainian inhabitants; the Slovenes did not speak Serbo-Croatian, and neither did the Macedonians or the Albanians of Kosovo. The rationale for including so many minorities in these new states was that it was impossible to draw proper lines of division in such an ethnic kaleidoscope, that larger states would be more economically viable than smaller, more ethnically homogeneous ones, and, more important, that the large states would be more effective barriers against Russian and Hungarian bolshevism. It was also hoped that serious minority problems would be avoided by requiring all states in the area to sign minority-protection treaties that guaranteed the civil rights of all citizens, irrespective of ethnicity.

Problems of integration

In the years immediately after World War I, the Balkans experienced instability and insecurity. Political extremists exploited the political unrest caused by mass demobilization and a return to civilian production. As the chief threat to the newly emerging order was believed to be that of Russian bolshevism, it was not surprising that communist parties had been outlawed in all Balkan states by the end of 1925.

There were also immense long-term difficulties in uniting the previously disjointed territories. Where railway networks existed, they served the needs of the old empires rather than the new states; those in the former Russian areas even had a different gauge. In addition, legal codes and taxation systems had to be unified, and common currencies had to be forged. The latter process was made difficult in the early postwar years by rampant inflation, which was caused not least by the new governments’ spending beyond their means to create or extend the state machinery.

The problems of integration were made much more complex by the fact that the territories involved were differentially developed. The Ottoman conquest had deeply divided the Balkans, those areas under the sultan’s authority being subject to different laws, to different social customs, and to a system that adapted painstakingly slowly to economic change. The states that emerged from Ottoman domination—Serbia, Albania, Bulgaria, and, to a lesser extent, Romania—were therefore less developed and poor. Into them were now merged former Russian or Austro-Hungarian territories, some (though not all) of which were more developed. Slovenia, Croatia, and Transylvania had more developed intelligentsias, more efficient and honest bureaucracies, an emerging economic infrastructure, and extensive and frequently profitable trade links with other parts of the empire. These relatively prosperous and advanced areas were now subjected to political cultures that they could regard only as more primitive and less honest. Furthermore, those political cultures were becoming more inclined to centralism rather than the devolution that the new provinces would have preferred. Herein lay the origin of many of the problems that beset interwar Yugoslavia and Romania.

One issue that was settled with relative ease was land reform. Land redistribution was very much the order of the day, not least because the new governments were convinced that the peasants would be forced into the arms of the communists if the great estates were not broken up. The Romanian government delivered on its promise of land reform as soon as the war was over; the new Yugoslav government passed similar legislation, as did that of Bulgaria, where nearly all land, except church and monastic properties, was already peasant-owned. In the former Habsburg and Russian territories, land reform had clear ethnic overtones. The dispossessed aristocracy belonged primarily to the former dominating elements: German, Hungarian, or Russian; the new owners were predominantly from the formerly subject groups: Croat, Romanian, Ukrainian, and Slovene—though poor Magyar or German peasants were also allowed a share of the redistributed property. The process of redistribution was not equally enforced; it frequently created resentment and perpetrated injustice, and it was perhaps of questionable economic value. Nevertheless, it was a social and political necessity in the climate of the early 1920s, and in many ways the ordered reallocation of property, with compensation to the previous owners, was a considerable achievement for the Balkan regimes.

With the exception of Albania, internal stability was achieved by the mid-1920s. However, stability came at the cost of stronger central authorities, a trend that was to intensify in the following decade. International relations also stabilized. From the early 1920s until the rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the Balkan states enjoyed a large degree of freedom from foreign influence and interference, owing to the disappearance of the Habsburg and Russian empires and the neutralization of the Dardanelles. The fascist Italy of dictator Benito Mussolini did try to extend its influence in the eastern Adriatic, but it was not strong enough to attempt unilateral territorial expansion. The dangers from the other revisionist states, Hungary and Bulgaria, were controlled by the Little Entente, an alliance of Romania, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia created in 1920–21 and backed by the French. Sources of interstate tension did remain, not least over the ultimate destiny of Macedonia, but there was a presumption that international disputes would be contained by the newly formed League of Nations. Although the League of Nations would later falter, it was able to contain the bitter dispute between Bulgaria and Greece in 1925–26.

The Great Depression

Both internal and external stability were destroyed by the great economic crisis of 1929–32. As exporters of primary produce, the Balkan states suffered immediately. From 1929 to 1933 the value of Albanian imports and exports fell by three-fifths and two-fifths, respectively; the corresponding figures for Bulgaria were three-fourths and more than one-half, for Romania three-fifths and one-half, and for Yugoslavia by about two-thirds for each.

The Great Depression had a universal impact. By forcing agricultural prices down more rapidly than those of manufactured goods, it caught Balkan peasants in a price scissors that featured a widening gap between the rising costs of imports and the shrinking farm income available to pay for them. Previously, with credit easily available, interest rates low, and markets for produce seemingly assured, peasants who had benefited from land redistribution had borrowed not only frequently but heavily—and not only for the purchase of implements, seed, and stock but also for consumption. In Yugoslavia no more than one-fourth of the sums borrowed in the 1920s were used for productive purposes. When the depression came and exports fell, peasants were often unable to earn enough to pay interest on their loans and redeem the capital; yet, as the economic climate worsened, banks put more and more pressure on them to do so. At the state level the policy of the 1920s of borrowing foreign capital to cover trade deficits now became impossible, because export earnings could no longer be guaranteed to service any further loans. The weakness of an agrarian economy in a world dominated by industrial production had been devastatingly revealed.

The depression highlighted another structural weakness in the Balkans: population growth. Between 1920 and 1939 the population of Albania increased by 16.3 percent, Bulgaria by 32.3 percent, Romania by 28.2 percent, and Yugoslavia by 31 percent. Before World War I the pressures of population growth had been relieved by emigration and by the presence in most areas (Romania excluded) of surplus land to be brought into cultivation. In the interwar period that was less and less the case. As the population grew more rapidly in the countryside than in the towns, the Balkans became an area of intense rural overpopulation and underemployment. It has been estimated that some 25 percent of the Romanian and Bulgarian and 40 percent of the Yugoslav rural population were not needed for the levels of production then being obtained. In many areas the prevailing practice was to divide inheritances, so that population growth without massive emigration to cities or abroad meant a diminution in the size of individual holdings. For example, although 12 acres (5 hectares) was generally regarded as the minimum necessary to maintain an average family, that was the maximum size of the smallholdings that accounted for two-thirds of landownership in Yugoslavia in the early 1930s.

In response to the depression, the Balkan governments followed three general policies: cost reduction, debt alleviation, and market monopolization. Cost reduction, which had only a limited effect, was attempted through subsidies for new technology, the spread of more information on efficient farming, and the encouragement of greater cooperation. Debt alleviation was more successful in containing the worst social impact of the rising indebtedness caused by the depression. Measures taken included a limitation of or a ban upon foreclosures, the postponement of payments, the reduction of interest rates, and the translation of rural debts into long-term loans at low and fixed interest rates. Some debts were also reduced; in Yugoslavia a number of them were even liquidated, with the government compensating the lenders. Nevertheless, the restriction of debt payments by governments acted as a disincentive to potential internal and external investors. Market monopolization was attempted early as Bulgaria, Romania, and Yugoslavia established state trading organizations that aimed to stabilize farm incomes by monopolizing the purchase and sale of cereal grains. In subsequent years these organizations extended their control over other products.

Political extremism and World War II

The social crisis that flowed from the depression acted as a powerful stimulus to authoritarianism. Primarily, it was the monarchs who exercised such authority, and even the one native fascist movement of any strength, Romania’s Iron Guard, did not take power until King Carol II had been humiliated by the forced cession of territory to Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Soviet Union in 1940. Royal power grew because the other political forces had been neutralized: the old right had been discredited by the war and its social base undermined by the land reforms; the urban left had been powerless since the mid-1920s; and the agrarians had become disunited. In addition, the army had been neutralized in Yugoslavia in 1917 and in Bulgaria in 1935–36; in Albania and Romania it had never enjoyed the same power.

The depression fueled the rise to power of Adolf Hitler in Germany, and his advent caused the Balkan states to consider measures for their collective security. In 1934 Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, and Romania signed the Balkan Entente, which attempted to guarantee the independence of the signatories. Despite strong efforts to bring Bulgaria into the fold, no government in Sofia dared state openly that it accepted the Treaties of Paris as permanent—the price demanded for inclusion in the Entente. The movement toward Balkan unity therefore achieved little more than a series of agreements to cooperate in such matters as hygiene and sports.

The Balkan Entente had been intended to unite the governments of the region to such a degree that collectively they would be able to resist pressures from outside powers. A much more powerful force worked in the opposite direction. The depression had left most Balkan economies without export markets for their agricultural produce. The Germans, even before Hitler, provided such a market, but only under stringent conditions. Germany would buy primary products, often at prices well above world levels, but would deposit the purchasing money in closed accounts in Berlin; the money could be used only to purchase German-manufactured products. These “blocked mark” agreements worked well for tobacco, grains, meat, and meat products but not for industrial products, such as Romanian oil or Yugoslav copper, which could command decent prices on the open market. Nevertheless, the blocked mark agreements brought a huge increase in German arms sales to the Balkans, which in turn enhanced German political influence in the region.

Despite the growing German influence, the Balkans were not lured into the Nazi camp. Quite to the contrary, as in World War I, the Balkan states showed great reluctance to become involved in the developing confrontation between the European powers. After the incorporation of Austria into the German Reich in March 1938, however, Germany shared a border with Yugoslavia, and the pressures on the Balkan states increased immeasurably. By 1939 Italy was able to march into Albania without resistance from any power, great or small.

The German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of August 1939 enabled the two countries to partition northeastern Europe, but they soon fell out over the Balkans. By late 1940, as the German presence in Romania grew ever greater, the Soviets were demanding that the eastern part of the peninsula fall under their sphere of influence and that they be allowed to establish naval bases on the Bulgarian coast—an obvious stepping stone to Istanbul and the Dardanelles. Given the experience of the Baltic states, this was not an attractive proposition for the Bulgarians; in March 1941 they signed Hitler’s Tripartite Pact. Later in the same month, a military coup d’état moved the Yugoslavs in the opposite direction, and it was the prospect of a hostile Yugoslavia, which could so easily have linked up with any British intervention in Greece, that brought Hitler to the decision that he had to invade. Yugoslavia was destroyed in a matter of weeks in April 1941; Greece, after having put up a strong resistance to the Italians, followed a few weeks later.

Under Hitler’s domination Yugoslavia disappeared. Its territory—with the exception of Croatia, which became a nominally independent entity—was partitioned among Germany, Hungary, Italy, and Bulgaria. Although Hitler had done nothing to prevent the loss of Bessarabia, Bukovina, the southern Dobruja, and northern Transylvania in 1940, Romania aligned itself with Germany. After joining the attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, it received as its reward Bessarabia and Transnistria, as it called territory that it occupied to the east of the Dniester River as far as the Southern Buh. Bulgaria did not enter the war against the Soviet Union, but it did declare war on both Britain and the United States. The entire region was subjected to the needs of the German war economy, and Nazi policies were imposed in other areas.

World War II, like all other major historical events, brought about changes in the Balkan ethnic map. In all territories occupied by any Balkan state since the fighting began, the Nazis insisted upon carrying out the Final Solution, the mass extermination of Europe’s Jewish population. In the two technically independent states of Bulgaria and Romania, however, local governments refused to apply these measures in areas that they had controlled before expansion. After the war most of the surviving Jews left these states for Israel or the West. By contrast, the Independent State of Croatia launched an all-out attack on both Jews and Serbs. Of the latter, it was said, one-third would be converted to Roman Catholicism, one-third expelled, and one-third exterminated—and the Croatian Ustaše showed every sign of taking such predictions seriously. Immediately after the fighting, thousands of Germans left, as did large numbers of Hungarians and other minorities.

Resistance movements in the Balkans varied greatly in strength and purpose. In Romania there was no opportunity for resistance to build up gradually as the Soviet Red Army advanced, but in Bulgaria the vast majority of acts of resistance occurred in the months before troops crossed the border in September 1944. In Albania and, especially, Yugoslavia, the resistance movements were much more complex in that they were characterized by dual campaigns. In the first campaign competing resistance groups fought alone or, on occasion, in concert to secure liberation; in the second campaign they fought one another even more viciously in order to determine the nature of the liberated state and society.

In Yugoslavia, Dragoljub (Draža) Mihailović’s Chetniks desired a restoration of a monarchy ruling over a country dominated by Serbia. Their strategy was to equip and train a resident force that would stage a full-scale uprising when the Allied armies approached. Until then, it was argued, resistance fighters could inflict little real damage on the occupiers, whose fearsome retributions would do real and lasting harm to the Serb nation. The communist-dominated Partisans, on the other hand, created a standing army that established itself in the remote mountains, particularly of western Bosnia. Led by Josip Broz (a communist of mixed Croat-Slovene origin, who took on the nom de guerre Tito), they waged a constant struggle, arguing that the retaliations taken by the Germans would in the long run force all Yugoslavs into the ranks of the resisters. In areas under their control, the Partisans instituted wide-ranging social reforms that indicated clearly the form of society they wished to create after the war. They also declared their intention to create a federal state in which each nation would enjoy equal rights. Nevertheless, in Yugoslavia, as in most Balkan countries, the decisive factors were not internal but external. In the internal struggle between Chetniks and Partisans, the latter were massively aided by Britain’s decision to switch logistic support from Mihailović to Tito, and in the end it was the Red Army that liberated Yugoslavia.

The Soviet liberation of the Balkans had a major impact on the region’s postwar political complexion. Some anticommunists in the Balkans had hoped that Anglo-American forces might land in the peninsula, but these hopes were dashed by the Allied landings in Italy, southern France, and Normandy. By October 1944 British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was using the Balkans as a bargaining chip in his attempts to secure a better working relationship with the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. At Churchill’s suggestion it was agreed that the Soviet Union would have dominant influence in Romania and Bulgaria while the West would enjoy the same advantage in Greece. Yugoslavia and Hungary were to be shared equally, and Albania was not even mentioned. Although it has been a matter of intense debate as to how long Churchill intended these agreements to remain in force, they helped to establish the communist authority that was to dominate the Balkans for nearly the next half century.

Communism

After World War II, Albania and Yugoslavia almost immediately fell to the communists, who owed their victory to their strength within the resistance movements and to the disengagement of the Western powers from the region. In Romania and Bulgaria the communists moved more cautiously and slowly than in Albania and Yugoslavia, but by the end of 1947 they had gradually eliminated all opponents from the army, the noncommunist trade unions, the civil service, and the other political parties.

Questions of federation

It seemed that, for the first time in many generations, the Balkans would be united, and once again it was an external force—this time Soviet communism—that was the dominant influence. The more optimistic of the communists hoped that this new, ideologically homogeneous Balkan region would also be one that was more clearly defined. In the north it would include Romania and the Roman Catholic areas of Yugoslavia but not Catholic Austria; in this way the old dividing lines between Catholic and Orthodox Europe, between the former Habsburg and Ottoman lands, would be discarded. There were still frontier disputes with Austria over Carinthia and, more seriously, with Italy over Trieste, but the communist optimists—owing to the resoluteness of Tito—hoped to incorporate Trieste. They also hoped that communists would be successful in the civil war in Greece and thereby enable that country to be integrated into the new Balkans.

These dreams were dashed, however, as were dreams that ideological conformity would produce political unity. Although a broad Balkan federation was more seriously discussed than at any previous time, it failed to materialize. The dominant internal force in the region was Tito’s Yugoslavia, which viewed Balkan federalization as a process in which new units would be added to the six republics that constituted the new, federal South Slav state. The Bulgarians refused to accept this, instead anticipating that such a federation would be the coming together of two equal partners, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria—or three partners, if Romania could be included. Most Albanians too had reservations about being absorbed into a Belgrade-dominated federation. Predictably, however, an external factor—Stalin—was decisive in the eventual outcome. By 1947 he had decided that Tito was becoming too powerful within the communist empire and that he should not be allowed too great an extension of his influence. Moscow vetoed Balkan federation, and in 1948 Yugoslavia was expelled from the Soviet communist camp.

Establishing the power of the party

Yugoslavia’s expulsion from the Soviet bloc did not lead it to abandon communism. Initially, Tito held fast to his interpretation of Marxism-Leninism, and thus a unity of policy was preserved. All the Balkan states pushed down the path of agricultural collectivization, rapid urbanization, and industrialization. Also, despite doctrinal differences between Belgrade and the pro-Soviet leaders in the other capitals, there was a general uniformity of political and social practices. The communist takeovers had seen the elimination, usually by the most brutal of methods, of the communists’ political opponents. Once communist power had been established, party control was imposed over every aspect of life through the existing mechanisms of the political police, through a nomenklatura system that gave local party leaders a stranglehold on all important or rewarding jobs, and through mass social organizations such as trade unions, Soviet friendship societies, and women’s and youth groups—all of which were ultimately controlled by the communists. Within a brief period there were few adult citizens whose lives were not ultimately dependent on the goodwill of the party.

An integral part of the consolidation of communist authority was a series of purges that first affected the party itself and then spread to encompass the whole society in a mesh of terror and intimidation. In Albania, Bulgaria, and Romania those who suffered were likely to be dubbed “national deviationists” or “Titoists”; in Yugoslavia they were “Cominformists,” or those who wished to subordinate national sovereignty to the wider interests of the international communist movement run from Moscow. In all cases the purges served to intimidate both the party and the population at large into inactivity while collectivization and industrialization precipitated widespread social change and tension. Among those particularly at risk during the purges were individuals who had connections with organizations outside the communist bloc. Protestant churches suffered heavily, as did the Roman Catholic church when it was not too entrenched an institution to tackle. Societies such as the Boy Scouts, the Rotarians, and even the Esperantists, which had maintained contact with similar organizations in the West, were condemned and disbanded, with their leading members usually imprisoned or placed in forced labour camps. All this meant that the Balkans were more isolated from the West than at any other time since the height of Ottoman power in the 16th century.

Pulling back from Moscow

Isolation from the West was coupled with increasing Soviet influence. The Soviet Union sent thousands of advisers to work on construction projects and in the armies, civil services, railways, parties, and—above all—secret police forces of the Balkan states. The Soviet model was copied in education, culture, the military, and all other aspects of public life. In Bulgaria two individual letters were dropped from the alphabet to make it appear more like Russian. In Romania there were furious and hardly convincing efforts to show that Romanian was a Slav language, and in Bessarabia (which had been reincorporated into the Moldavian S.S.R.) the Romanian language was now printed in Cyrillic. The national economies were not only refashioned on the Soviet model but also subordinated to Soviet needs. This subordination was particularly true for Bulgaria and Romania, which, as defeated powers in World War II, were forced to sign disadvantageous trade agreements with the Soviet Union and had to agree to the creation of so-called joint-stock companies.

Despite such initial ideological unity, the Balkans rapidly reverted to their customary divisions. Even before the split of 1948, the Yugoslavs, though remaining rigidly loyal to Marxist-Leninist ideas, had balked at many aspects of the Soviets’ patronizing and domineering behaviour. They had successfully resisted attempts by Stalin to set up joint-stock companies, and they were perplexed at the Soviet demand to place its agents in a country and a party that had proved themselves loyal to Stalin, the Soviet Union, and socialism. Even after 1948 Tito continued to insist that he had broken with the Cominform but not with socialism. Although Yugoslavia soon accepted American aid, its Stalinist economic and police policies were not diluted until the early 1950s. After that, with his introduction of “socialist self-management” and his leadership in the nonaligned movement, Tito sought to plot a middle way between the two opposing poles of the Cold War—though his basic commitment to socialism was never in doubt.

Albania was next to leave the Soviet fold. Albanian nationalism had already reacted unfavourably to Yugoslav plans for union, and, after the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s rapprochement with Tito in 1955, the Albanian party leader Enver Hoxha became disillusioned with Moscow as well. Beginning in 1961, Albania found support from the Kremlin’s new rival, China.

Romania broke loose in the early 1960s. Soviet plans to introduce a division of labour in the socialist economies through the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (commonly known as Comecon) would have made good many of the faults of Stalinism, which had produced autarkic economies in each Balkan state, but they also would have required Romania’s economy to remain predominantly agricultural and thereby would have slowed social evolution and progress toward full communism. Romania therefore switched to a more nationally oriented policy that was well received by the majority of its skeptical population and provided the regime with much-needed legitimacy. Thereafter, Romania could not forgo its nationally oriented policies, but once again commitment to socialism was never in doubt. Unlike Albania, Romania remained a member (albeit a maverick one) of the Warsaw Pact, a Soviet-led military alliance formed in 1955.

These deviations from the Soviet line made Bulgaria the sole Balkan country to maintain loyalty to and conformity with Soviet policies. Yet the Soviets could tolerate this situation because the Balkan Peninsula was declining in strategic importance. The major land confrontation with the West would now take place, it was assumed, in Germany, while the delivery systems of modern long-range weapons diminished the significance of the Dardanelles as a naval asset.

Economic collapse and nationalist resurgence

Although the communist Balkan states differed in many respects, there were similarities. When the regimes had settled into place, nepotism appeared in Albania, Bulgaria, and Romania: after Hoxha’s death in 1985, his wife continued to exercise considerable influence; Todor Zhivkov gave his daughter control of cultural affairs and, at the end of his years in power, was attempting to move his son up the party ladder; in Romania, Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife placed at least 40 relatives in prominent party and state posts.

Nationalism also came to dominate the affairs of all states. Initially, many observers thought that the advent of communist party rule had at last solved the issue of nationalism. In Romania a new autonomous region was created for the Hungarians, and in Bulgaria minorities enjoyed unprecedented freedom in education, publishing, and culture. In Yugoslavia cooperation between the constituent republics was smooth and effective, and Serb-Croat relations were never closer than immediately after the signature in 1954 of the Novi Sad agreement, by which the writers unions of the two republics (organizations that could not act without official approval) agreed to cooperate in literary and linguistic matters.

The new cooperation created a misleading image. Resentments and hostilities were concealed rather than removed. Thousands of Turks were expelled from Bulgaria as their land was collectivized, and many Roma (Gypsies) were expelled with them. In Yugoslavia internal harmony flowed more from the fear of Cominform intervention than from the burying of old hatchets. By the 1960s other difficulties had become apparent. For example, in the immediate postwar years the Bulgarian communists had acknowledged the existence of a Macedonian minority in their country and had even been prepared to cede parts of Bulgaria to a separate Macedonia that would be part of a broader Balkan confederation. However, after the split between Tito and Stalin, there was an immediate reversal in Sofia, so that by the early 1960s severe penalties were imposed on anyone making a public display of Macedonian identity. In Romania the Hungarian autonomous region was gerrymandered out of existence in 1960, the Hungarian revolt of 1956 providing Bucharest’s leaders with an excellent excuse to increase central control over this minority. For other minorities there were increasing restrictions, and they were in any case becoming more aware that official toleration had been extended to them primarily to make indoctrination more effective; Bulgarian Turks, for example, could easily obtain the works of Marx or Stalin in Turkish, but not the Qurʾān.

The nationalist issue was complicated by economic factors. By the mid-1960s it was clear that the economic system was in need of reform. This was in part because the first stage of socialist construction, based on extensive development and the building of a heavy industrial base, was nearing completion. The next would be based more on technological innovation and on the satisfaction of consumer needs. In 1965 the Yugoslavs went ahead with a radical reform program that was intended to move the economy toward “market socialism” by allowing the private ownership of small businesses, abolishing many price controls, and requiring larger enterprises to compete more directly with one another and with foreign companies. Meanwhile, the Romanians sought ways to make themselves less dependent on the rest of the Soviet bloc, and the Bulgarians initiated a number of changes, only to be frightened off by the conservative climate that followed the suppression of the Prague Spring, a period of liberal social and economic reforms, in 1968. Other reform programs followed in the late 1970s and early ’80s.

The salient feature of all the major reform initiatives throughout the Balkans was that they failed. Promises of increased standards of living could not be kept, which fatally compromised the prevailing Marxist-Leninist ideology. By the mid-1960s there were few adherents to the old ideology, but the power structure remained, and those who benefited from it were determined to maintain it. Needing to find an alternative means to legitimacy, they instead chose nationalism. In foreign affairs each state emphasized its individual approach, while in domestic policy pressures on minorities were intensified—Bulgaria forcing Roma and then Pomaks (Bulgarian-speaking Muslims) to adopt Bulgarian names and the Romanian government subjecting Hungarian and German speakers to ever-greater assimilationist pressures.

The use of nationalism as a legitimizing factor in the communist state was possible only where that state was a true nation-state, such as in Albania, Bulgaria, and Romania. In Yugoslavia, however, attempts to create a sense of Yugoslav identity had only limited success. In all eastern European states, the communist takeovers had brought to power individuals who were not only ideologically committed but uncharacteristically young and therefore not well educated. After 20 years of communist domination, another and much-better-educated generation had emerged only to find that most of the rewarding and influential jobs were occupied by people who, though less qualified than they, had 20 more years to serve before retirement. In all states this was a source of tension and one more reason for the regimes to seek enhanced legitimization, but in Yugoslavia—especially Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina—tension was made worse by the fact that the first generation of rulers recruited during the Partisan struggle contained a disproportionate number of Serbs. By the 1960s the fear of Soviet pressure, which had been a unifying force in Yugoslavia immediately after the split of 1948, was no longer felt, and it was revived only momentarily in August 1968 by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Moreover, reforms in the 1960s had allowed Yugoslavs to travel abroad, and many had gone to work in western Europe. These people returned not only with German marks and American dollars but also with greater expectations of freedom, national as well as individual—expectations that could only be heightened by moves toward liberalization and decentralization in the new Yugoslav constitution of 1963. At the same time, with an increasing inflow of hard currency, the northern republics grew resentful of the obligation to lodge most of this money in the federal bank in Belgrade. Such centrifugal pressures could not go unnoticed for long, and, indeed, by 1968 the Croatian party had become dominated by nationalist communists—who were then purged by Tito.

Yugoslav devolutionists were granted concessions in the 1974 constitution, which gave the party of each constituent element of the federation much greater authority in its own area. For the most part, interference from without was prevented, and in this way the Yugoslav republics became fiefdoms ruled by native barons in much the same way that the other Balkan states were ruled by their national parties. This compartmentalization became a fundamental feature of Yugoslav stability for the next decade. It was in his rejection of this convention by revoking the autonomy of Kosovo in 1989 that the Serbian party leader Slobodan Milošević upset Yugoslavia’s already fragile peace. (By the turn of the 21st century, he had definitively destroyed the idea of Yugoslavism.)

The transition from authoritarianism to democracy in the Balkans was punctuated in many areas, particularly in Yugoslavia, with civil war. By December 1990 both Croatia and Slovenia had voted for autonomy and the Serb minority in Croatia had sought to unite with Serbia. That same month Serbians elected the fiery nationalist and ex-communist Milošević president, and he launched a campaign aimed at unifying the Serbs for the first time since the great migration into the Habsburg empire at the end of the 17th century. Croatia and Slovenia both declared their independence on June 25, 1991; Macadeonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina soon followed; and, as fighting erupted over disputed territories of mixed population, the presidents of the six republics—Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia, Macedonia, and Montenegro—failed to revive the loose confederation. To stem the conflict the United Nations dispatched some 15,000 UN peacekeepers (mostly British and French) and devised a plan that would have divided Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia into a crazy quilt of cantons based on local ethnic majorities. However, the plan pleased no one, and fighting escalated amid atrocities and evidence of “ethnic cleansing” by the Serbs.

By the mid-1990s Slovenia was independent and at peace, and Macedonia, protected by a small international force, was admitted to the UN under the name (in deference to Greek sensibilities) The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Croatia controlled almost all its putative territory, including the Dalmatian coast. What remained of Yugoslavia included Serbia, Montenegro, and portions of Bosnia and Herzegovina inhabited or claimed by Bosnian Serbs, including a corridor stretching almost to the Adriatic Sea. The would-be state of Bosnia was strangled within this noose as the fighting between Serbs, Bosnian Serbs, Bosniacs (Muslims), and Croats shifted from Sarajevo to Goražde to Bihać. Each time a truce seemed near, fighting broke out anew, until a 1995 peace accord created a loosely federalized Bosnia and Herzegovina divided roughly between a Bosniac- (Muslim-) Croat federation and a Serb republicthe Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (a decentralized federation of Croats and Bosniacs) and the Republika Srpska (Bosnian Serb Republic). In Kosovo in February 1998, wide-scale fighting erupted between Serbs and ethnic Albanians when Milošević ordered troops into the province to regain territory controlled by the Kosovo Liberation Army. To bring about Serbia’s withdrawal, the following year the North Atlantic Treaty Organization launched a bombing campaign against Serbia, forcing Milošević to accept a peace plan jointly sponsored by Russia, the European Union (EU), and the United States. In 2000 Milošević was defeated in presidential elections by Vojislav Koštunica, and he was later arrested and extradited to The Hague to stand trial for war crimes.

The new Yugoslavia, now composed of only Serbia and Montenegro, attempted to rebuild its shattered society and economy, while the independent states of Bosnia and Herzogovina, Croatia, Macedonia, and Slovenia sought closer ties with the countries of the EU. However, secessionists in Montenegro soon pushed for independence from the new Yugoslavia, against the wishes of the international community, which feared that further political instability might rekindle the destructive forces that were unleashed in the early 1990s. In 2002 the EU brokered an agreement between the leaders of Yugoslavia, Serbia, and Montenegro that called for the formation of a loose federation, called Serbia and Montenegro, which would have a single federal policy on defense, foreign affairs, and trade but would grant each republic autonomy in most other policy areas and enable either republic to hold a referendum on independence after three years. The agreement was ratified by the federal parliament and the Serbian and Montenegrin assemblies in 2003, effectively erasing Yugoslavia from the map. Three years later, after Montenegrins approved a referendum on independence, Serbia and Montenegro disbanded the federation and became independent republics. Meanwhile, the future status of Kosovo remained uncertain; the ethnic Albanian majority there desired independence, but Serbia emphatically opposed it. Kosovo formally seceded from Serbia in February 2008. The United States and most members of the EU supported the move, but Serbia and Russia refused to recognize Kosovar independence.

Outside Yugoslavia, secession from a large federation also brought independence to the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, the majority of whose inhabitants were ethnic Romanians. This did not bring union with Romania, however, which would have angered Moldova’s own minorities—particularly the Russians. In Romania itself an ingrained fear of the security police produced a short and intense civil war. A similar development in Albania, where terror and deprivation had been as great, was only just avoided. Only in Bulgaria—where, for ethnic Bulgarians at least, the last years of communist rule had been relatively benign—was a peaceful transition achieved.

The various Balkan states thus found different paths out of socialism but faced similar problems when they emerged. The vast subsidized and hugely inefficient heavy industrial plants in which communist propagandists had taken such pride were now virtually useless. Their products, many of which had previously been sold in the “soft” Soviet and eastern European markets for “soft” currencies, were too low in quality and too high in price to survive in a competitive market. Widespread unemployment was the not-surprising consequence. Furthermore, the old communist-inspired industries left another and potentially even more dangerous legacy: environmental pollution on a prodigious scale.

In all postcommunist states except Serbia, the solutions to economic problems were expected to be found in a market economy and in eventual association with the EU. International agencies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund promised financial help for the new Balkan regimes but required an economic transformation, as the states were expected to privatize their industries and agriculture, remove government subsidies, and restrain public expenditure. The social costs of these adjustments were enormous. Restricting public expenditure meant limiting social security funds just when unemployment and inflation were taking their heaviest toll. In this context constructing an open, pluralist system that tolerated minority groups was a daunting task.

There were other challenges as well. As in the past, the Balkans had little more to export than food, raw materials, and agricultural products—the very items against which the EU’s tariffs discriminated most sharply. But even less promising was the obvious alternative: membership in a Black Sea zone sponsored by Turkey. Such an association would align the Balkan states with a less-developed area; it would divide them from the rest of Europe; and, most uncomfortable of all, it would turn the peninsula back toward Istanbul. Ever since the Slavs settled in the Balkans, they had attempted to restrict the power of that great city on the Bosporus, yet no sooner had they emerged from Byzantine rule than the Ottomans appeared and reestablished Eastern domination of the peninsula. From the end of the 18th century, centrifugal forces, spearheaded by Balkan Christian nationalism, gained greater strength, but the weakness of this movement was its inability to resolve differences between its own different nationalities. Domination first by central European fascism and then by Russian socialism followed, and, when these powers collapsed in turn, the Balkan peoples were no closer to union and faced the same dangers that had plagued them throughout the period they had occupied the peninsula.